How sports publishers must yearn for the days of Dickie Bird, whose innocent tales sold by the bucketful. Ultra-commercial dottiness. The spate of sporting memoirs this Christmas are far more hard-nosed - mainly concerned with settling scores - and I bet they won't sell a fraction of what Dickie managed in his heyday. Duncan Fletcher's autobiography, Behind the Shades (Simon & Schuster, £18.99), is principally concerned with self-justification. Fletcher, admittedly a coach so brilliant he managed to take Glamorgan to the county championship, has monumental self-regard. "Without wishing to brag, England's Test record under me had been very, very good," he brags.

Cricket obsessives will enjoy the book, which combines analysis of the eight years during which he resurrected England as a Test side with an explanation of his coaching methods. But it only truly comes alive in the chapter on the catastrophic 2006-7 series in Australia that cost him his job. Even here, though, the self-satisfied tone is offputting. Did he really bear no responsibility for England's capitulation? Was everything the fault of Freddie and his underperforming chum Harmy? This, after all, is the man who preferred creaky old retainer Ashley Giles to sparky newcomer Monty Panesar in the first Test, in which, tone-settingly, England were annihilated.

More player-coach aggro in the autobiographies of two England rugby union stalwarts, Lawrence Dallaglio (It's In the Blood, Headline, £18.99) and Mike Catt (Landing on My Feet, Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99), who in their concluding chapters chart England's curious progress through the recent world cup. Dallaglio, as befits his hard-man persona, takes no prisoners, blaming coach Brian Ashton's laid-back style for the early disasters. "Had a stranger walked in on any training session before the world cup," writes the former England captain, "he wouldn't have had a clue who was in charge." Catt is equally critical of the preparation for the early games - "no gameplan, no strike moves, nothing" - but says Ashton gained in confidence as the tournament progressed and was instrumental in getting England to the final. The two books are, like the England team itself, solid, honest and workmanlike, but not cup-winning. A few literary strike moves would have been welcome.

Youth is no bar to publishing your autobiography if you are famous enough. Panesar, English cricket's new cult hero, recounts his first 25 years in Monty's Turn (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99). It's typically enthusiastic - he quickly recovers from his disappointment at being left out for that first Ashes Test in 2006 and gets behind his embattled team-mates - but, with his international career only just beginning, there's no sense of perspective. For Monty-maniacs only.

Lewis Hamilton, the biggest thing to hit British sport since David Beckham, is even younger than Panesar, but that hasn't discouraged his first stab at a memoir, imaginatively titled My Story (HarperSport, £18.99). One day, someone will write a great book about Hamilton - the first black man to break into the rich white world of motor racing. This isn't it, but it's slickly produced and there are intriguing hints at how tough it was to get to the top: parents divorced when he was young, switched homes when he was a boy, bullied so much at school he took up karate. The race (in the colour sense) issue, though, is barely mentioned, and the book's dedication - "To my family, to McLaren and to Mercedes-Benz" - emphasises the essentially corporatist nature of the enterprise.

Jackie Stewart, the Hamilton of the 1960s, shows the value of waiting before trying to make sense of a sporting life in Winning Is Not Enough (Headline, £20). A fat 500-plus pages, packaged with a DVD of Stewart in his world championship-winning prime, this will summon up memories of a golden age for the sport - or rather of a golden age that was also grimly blood-spattered. The roll-call of racing deaths in the book is terrifying: four in four months, including Stewart's great friend Jim Clark, in 1968. "Today's F1 racing drivers have no conception of how it felt . . . to lose people you care for on a regular basis," writes Stewart. Motor racing now is technology-led and ultra-safe; racing then, in slender, virtually protectionless cars, was a deadly game. Death fed the glamour: an ugly truth.

The legend count is high this Christmas. Bobby Charlton, 70 this year, recounts his glittering club career in My Manchester United Years (Headline, £20), the first volume of his autobiography. Presumably, his England career will be dealt with in the second. The newly knighted Ian Botham revisits old feats and feuds in Head On (Ebury Press, £18.99). Severiano Ballesteros marks his retirement with Seve: The Official Autobiography (Yellow Jersey Press, £18.99), a pedestrian account of a great career that fell into vertiginous decline when he should still have been at his peak.

More enticing than all of these is Duncan Hamilton's Provided You Don't Kiss Me: Twenty Years with Brian Clough (Fourth Estate, £14.99), a sideways view of another legend. Hamilton, a journalist on the Nottingham Evening Post, doggedly followed Clough as he took Nottingham Forest to the unimagined heights of twice winning the European Cup. He brilliantly captures Clough's energy, spirit and monstrous ego, and doesn't shirk the alcoholism that ended his career and shortened his life. "He was like me dad," Hamilton tells a colleague when Clough dies in 2004. He says it in a funny, self-mocking voice, but he's serious.

There are books and there are products. Jim White's funny, self-deprecating You'll Win Nothing With Kids (Little, Brown, £12.99) is definitely in the former category. The meandering tale of what happens when White, a football-mad journalist, becomes manager of his son's soccer team, is ostensibly about footie. But really it's about life, and how fathers and sons find common ground.

In a nice echo of White's book, Kevin Cook's Tommy's Honour (HarperSport, £16.99) traces the relationship of Tom Morris, Scotland's champion golfer in the 1860s and a St Andrews legend, and his son Tom Morris junior. Cook's idiosyncratic history of the early days of professional golf is detailed, loving, almost novelistic. He captures the incestuous, money-obsessed, sometimes small-minded world of Scottish golf, crucible of the global game, delightfully, then darkens the mood as tragedy overwhelms the father and son who, between them, won eight of the first dozen Opens. An impressive achievement and unquestionably a book rather than a product, written for love and not lolly.